The Rest Is History - 371. The 1973 Chilean Coup: General Pinochet Seizes Power

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

The U.S. have given up on ousting the socialist President Allende through democratic means, and shift to a more militaristic approach, in the form of General Pinochet. Once known as the ‘dull dog’, a man who had a reputation for procuring Jeeps for his fellow troops, the son of a customs official, he would overthrow Allende and become a bloodthirsty tyrant, killing thousands and torturing far, far more. In our second episode on the 1973 Chilean coup, Tom and Dominic look at how the coup itself unfolded, Salvador Allende’s ensuing fate, and what life was like in Chile under the ruthless Pinochet. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Until the arrest of the former President Pinochet last October, Chile had achieved three remarkable successes, all of them in large measure due to former President Pinochet. First, it had seen the total defeat of communism at a time when that ideology was advancing throughout the hemisphere. As Eduardo Frei, the former Christian Democrat president of Chile put it, the military saved Chile. Secondly, Chile has seen the establishment of a thriving, free enterprise economy, which has transformed living standards and made Chile

into a model for Latin America. Thirdly, Chile is also remarkable because President Pinochet established a constitution for a return to democracy, held a plebiscite to decide whether or not he should remain in power, lost the vote, though gaining 44% support, respected the result, and handed over power to a democratically elected successor. So that, Dominic, was Margaret Thatcher speaking in 1999, by which point she was Baroness Margaret Thatcher in the House of Lords. And I'm kind of vaguely remembering this. General Pinochet, he'd become a senator.

He came to Britain, didn't he, on a visit to Mrs. Thatcher. He did. And there was a kind of extradition warrant put out for his arrest. By a Spanish judge on human rights violations charges. The Labour government of the day was put in a very difficult position, but they decided to honour the request for extradition. Pinochet was placed under house arrest, but eventually they found a loophole, which was his failing health,

because he was then advanced years. They claimed he was, it was said that he was suffering from dementia, I think, and he was free to return to Chile. And this was a very controversial story. Because my sense is that by and large, I mean, I can't imagine anyone who would be on Pinochet's side. That would be my gut instinct. My gut instinct would be, you know, the coup is a terrible thing. Yeah.

But that's a reminder that there were certainly people in Britain, and I guess in America, because they were busy fostering the coup, for whom Allende absolutely was a menace, and her Rafa Pinochet. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Tom. You're absolutely right. In the last Chilean presidential election, which was in 2021, the winning candidate was a guy called Gabriel Boric, and he is an avowed fan of Allende, born long after Allende's demise. But he made a point on his inauguration day of going to the statue of Allende in Santiago and kind of bowing before it in kind of prayer and

contemplation, to say, I'm kind of in your shadow. But the man he beat, José Antonio Cast, who is actually leading in the polls today for the next Chilean presidential election, who's a kind of right-wing populist. He's the nephew of Pinochet's banking chief and campaigned for Pinochet in that very referendum that Mrs. Thatcher mentioned when he was a student. So in other words, there are still... This is not an open and shut case, as it were. There is a large proportion of Chilean opinion that would absolutely agree with everything Mrs. Thatcher

said. And I think there are three points to make about that. One is, it's easy probably for us to forget that in the Cold War, a lot of people felt that you just had to pick a side. And that's what Mrs. Thatcher was saying there about communism and what Nixon and Kissinger would have said. You're with us or you're with them. And if you choose to go with them, well, God help you. Second thing is Mrs. Thatcher's economic program, what people now call neoliberalism. I don't really like that terminology, but people call it that. There are some, the attack on inflation, the very sort of abrasive, astringent medicine. There are definitely some similarities. And the third thing, and I think the most important thing for Mrs. Saturn from the British point of view, and there was no doubt about this.

We talked about this in our Falklands War podcast. Pinochet did back Britain in the Falklands War. I mean, the thing is that to outsiders, the Argentines and the Chileans look kind of identical with their dark glasses and their enthusiasm for electrocuting poets, but they absolutely despised each other. I remember it, yeah. And the Chileans gave Britain loads of assistance in the Falklands War. So Baroness Thatcher, Dominic, in that same speech described Chile as this country's oldest and truest friend in Latin America. Right. Well, so there you go.

So there you go, exactly. But Dominic, this is what sets this episode up, because I don't really know the truth about any of this. Right. I want to find out whether Allende was as much the goody and Pinochet the baddy as I've always kind of just vaguely assumed. Well, we ended last time in the spring of 1973. They've had congressional elections in Chile. Allende has been in for less than three years, but he has made this extraordinary beginning, redistributing land, nationalizing copper and banks and so on, pumping money into the economy and welfare spending and things. And yet at the same time, inflation has not really gone through the roof. I mean, it's gone through the stratosphere.

People's savings have been completely kind of debauched. People's living standards, if they're middle class, are falling rapidly. There's a sense of great hysteria among the middle classes. And I think it's actually, politics is always the clash of competing interest groups, isn't it? And you can completely see why, if you're living out in the countryside, very poor, Allende is your saviour. Allende is somebody who speaks for you. And as Ariel Dorfman said last time, makes you feel seen, gives you dignity. If you are a professional person, a lawyer or whatever, whose Uncle Jose's land has been redistributed, your savings have vanished because of inflation. You go into the shops, you can't, the shelves are empty, you're buying stuff on the black market.

And those people are frightened that this is merely the beginning. I think that's the thing. We talked last time about Allende personally. Allende is clearly not, he's not Stalin. He's not even Fidel Castro. But a lot of these people think this is just the start of something. And actually, if it's not checked, what happens to Allende is neither here nor there, because somebody will replace him who will be much more left-wing more repressive all of this kind of thing so that's the anxiety on the right i guess which is important to understand and so it's a class-based as well oh it's absolutely class-based it's very class-based absolutely so we talked last time about how the results of those parliamentary elections in the spring of 1973 means that the Americans have basically given up all hope of stopping Allende by democratic means, sort of with a lot of money, before the end of his term.

Dominic, just one last question on that. Do they have any qualms about that? Because the whole thing about America is that it's upholding democracy and the right of people to choose their own form of government. And that is one of the massive points of principle in the Cold War. They have no qualms about this. I wouldn't say they had any qualms whatsoever. I mean, I think that because they've been doing it for 20 years, they would say, I mean, I think if you're so. I think if you had, you know, not just Kissinger, because I think Kissinger is often too easy to make him. I think he's often made a scapegoat actually because of it because of he's a german jew

i mean i know that's a that may seem a heretical thing to say to some people but i think it's very easy for people to pick on him rather than his predecessor dean rusk or any william rogers or any of the other you know the much more waspish kind of i suppose that they're all they kind of blur into one don don't they? They do. They do. And Kissinger called it the media in a way they didn't. I wouldn't say it's anti-Semitism in itself, but he's such a distinctive figure with his gravelly German voice.

He is. He just stands out. Yes, he's become an avatar for American foreign policy more generally. But I think they would say, look, this is not a clean fight. The Soviet Union in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s twisted and abused democracy. If we have our hands clean, we will lose. We have to use their methods. That's exactly what they would say. So I don't think they have any qualms about interfering with democracy in that sense. But I do think that by 1973, they have already established links with the Chilean army. They have identified officers who, as we said last time, are sick of

their low salaries and things. They're quite a closed sort of caste, the Chilean army. Interestingly, because they're poorly paid, they can't kind of join in. They're too badly paid to kind of join in wider society very much. So they socialize just with themselves. They're in country clubs. Officers are often married to the daughters or sisters of other officers. So the Americans work very hard. It's a caste.

Yeah, to penetrate this caste and to basically bring them over to their way of thinking. Now, by the summer of 1973, quite a few people in the Chilean army think, okay, Allende just has to be stopped. He's gone too far. And there's a first attempt at a coup,

which is called the Tanquetazo, which is at the end of June. Tanquetazo, because they use a lot of tanks. It's like an unimaginative name. This guy called Roberto Supa. And he leads these tanks into Santiago to try and topple the government. And it actually has nowhere near enough support. I think he has something like 16 vehicles.

He has about 80 soldiers. They open fire actually on the presidential palace, the ministry of defense and so on, but it doesn't go anywhere. Allende speaks to the nation. He rallies support. The commander in chief of the army who rejoices in the name of Carlos Prats. Carlos Prats. Crazy name, crazy guy. He is the successor to General Schneider, who we talked about last time. And he similarly believes that the army should obey the constitution. So he persuades a lot of the mutineers to abandon the cause. And he gets his chief of staff, who is a man called Augusto Pinochet, to lead-

And that's how you pronounce it? Well, there are different pronunciations of Pinochet's name. So the classic thing is that everybody in Britain calls him General Pinochet. And then people who are sort of trying to be pedantic say, oh, no, actually, I think you'll find it's Pinochet. But having sort of dug into this a bit in the Bodleian Library, it turns out that the recordings of him saying his own name, Chileans often swallow the tea at the end of the word so actually what he actually says is Pinochet Pinochet yeah that's what we'll call him then but when we slip into because we're British so we'll obviously slip into calling him General Pinochet as people always do so listeners will just know J as in Che Guevara as in Che Guevara

yeah but in Britain people often say Che Guevara don As in Che Guevara, yeah. But in Britain, people often say Che Guevara, don't they? We just, we have our own distinct ways, don't we, in this island of ours. But we respect Chilean pronunciation, so it will be General Pinochet. Well, anyway, listen, he leads troops to help put down the mutiny. The mutiny fizzles out within hours. And Allende addresses this massive demonstration from La Moneda, from the presidential palace. And he gives this ringing speech at the end. He says, trust your government, go home, kiss your wives and your children in the name of Chile.

And everybody, hurrah, hurrah, the coup has been defeated. Isn't this great? But actually, that coup is just the warmup because there are lots of people in the Chilean military who look at this and they're like, well, you know what? Actually, it's a bit like the Prigogine thing in Russia. They got quite a long way without being stopped. There were only a few of them, and they came pretty close. So actually, we could learn the lessons from this, and next time, it'll be different. And the CIA, they are very optimistic. So they are actually, by the mid to late summer of 1973,

they are sending reports to Washington saying loads of the Chilean officers are talking about a coup. They're talking about dates. We reckon this could probably work. The one problem they have is this bloke, General Prats, because he is very loyal to the regime. Now, ideally, the CIA would love to have him kidnapped, but they tried that with the previous bloke in the last episode, and that was an absolute shambles. And had that been rumbled?

So did people know who it was that tried to kidnap him? So I think people suspect American interference, but the Americans don't want to do it again because it was a shambles the first time. It'd look very bad if it goes wrong. And it also might end up boosting support for Allende. People will rally to the constitution. But fate plays into their hands in a very bizarre way. In June 1973, General Prats has been driven in his official car through the sort of professional upper middle class areas of Santiago through an area called Las Condes. And at the time, a lot of the sort of, you know, the people on the right, when they see him, they'll kind of jeer him, shout insults at him because, you know, they blame him for

bolstering Allende. And he gets to the crossroads and this little Renault car pulls up next to him. And two people start making obscene gestures at him, shouting abuse and stuff. General Pratchett, he's a military man, Tom. He reacts as a military man perhaps should. He gets his gun and starts shooting at the car. That's how you think generals should respond to being insulted. Exactly.

He starts shooting. No nonsense. Well, he starts shooting at the car the cars both stop and the drivers get out general pratt's realizes to his horror that the driver of the other car that the crop haired driver of the other car who he thought was a man is actually a housewife called alejandrina cox and goodness so he'd misgendered her he'd misgendered her. He'd misgendered her. She starts shouting at him, you've been firing bullets into my car. Lots of passers-by gathering, they all take her side. There's a terrible scene of pushing and shoving and stuff. He actually ends up being rescued by a taxi driver. So this is a very embarrassing and shambolic incident. The Prats and Mrs. Cox

actually end up making public apologies to each other. They agree to kind of bury the hatchet, but this really damages his reputation. And the wives of his officers start to have demonstrations against him outside his house. And we can be absolutely sure this isn't some American thing. Well, I don't know. I mean, who knows? I suppose we can't, can we? We can't. I mean, no one, the Americans could not have known that he would start shooting the car.

They couldn't have put him up to that. Alejandrina Cox is clearly one of these people who is, you know, on the right, middle class, all of this sort of, you know, very anti-IAN day. But I don't think she's necessarily a CIA asset. Maybe the listeners, some of our listeners will know, and I would love to be corrected if I'm wrong. Anyway, Pratt eventually resigns. By the way, the key newspaper, Tom, in drumming up antipathy to him is, of course, El Mercurio, this newspaper funded by ITT and by the CIA. So the person who succeeds Prats on the 22nd of August, 1973 is his chief of staff, a man who's not been in this story at all up to this point, except for that little outing at the mutiny. And that is General Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ujate. So this is Mrs. Thatcher's poster boy.

We haven't talked about him at all because he's not been an interesting character. This is the extraordinary thing, actually. He is the son. He's the son of a customs official, Tom, like Adolf Hitler. Oh, well, that tells you all you need to know. If you are listening to this episode

of The Rest is History and you are a customs official, do better with your son. Yeah, exactly. Actually, his father wanted Pinochet to be a doctor like Allende, but he wasn't. He joined the army, which is a great way of sort of seeing a self-improvement in Chile, in Latin America generally. Also like Allende, he's a very keen Freemason. I wonder if they'd met in the lodge. I don't know. Well, obviously, they Latin America generally. Also like Allende, he's a very keen Freemason. I wonder if they'd met in the lodge. I don't know. Well, they'd obviously, they've met loads. They've met loads because Allende

thinks Pinochet is a fine fellow. He thinks he's very loyal, very reliable. He's a kind of dull dog, isn't he? He's a very dull dog. He'd been the commander of the garrison in Santiago. Then he was the commander of the whole Santiago province. When there were protests against Allende, Pinochet would command the troops. One of Allende's men said of Pinochet, he was the guy we would call if we needed a jeep. So he's just, as you say, they think of him as just a boring, loyal, a nobody. And actually the CIA and who and the american state department and all these people who are compiling reports on all the chilean officers they think exactly the same so this is a defense intelligence agency report quiet mild-mannered very business-like very honest

hard-working dedicated a devoted tolerant husband and father, lives very modestly, drinks scotch and pisco sours, smokes cigarettes, likes parties. And this is the CIA. Mild, friendly, narrow-gauge military man who is totally immersed in his new field of security, public order, and political events, and who clearly enjoys the feeling of being important. But all the reports say of him, he will not lead a coup. He is not the man. he is not the figurehead he's too dull he's like a staff officer he's like a number two or a number three

and they would say if the CIA reckon if there is a coup he will probably go along with it because he was a you know he's part of that Prussian kind of ethos of the Chilean army but you know he's not a man for thinking outside the box. Not at all. He's utterly, utterly conventional and boring. The only interesting thing I discovered really about Pinochet is that, do you know who's a huge bibliophile?

So he had a private library of 55,000 books. He would collect old books. When he became president, he would send his military attaches around the world to buy antiquarian books. But a very damning sign, Tom. As with so many middle-aged men, his library contains no fiction and absolutely no poetry. Oh, so this is bad news for all the poets who are being funded by the Allende

government. Very, very bad news. Now, just as we move towards the break, August 1973, the climate is definitely getting worse. There is yet another trucker strike. There is, as we discussed last time, this rumbling constitutional row between the Supreme Court and Congress on the one hand and the Allende government on the other. The Americans have spent a lot of money basically pushing their friends in the Chilean Congress to be tougher on Allende. The Congress actually passes a resolution

to say that Allende is breaching the constitution, that he's using the power of decree too much, that he is undermining Chilean democracy. And Allende says, well, that is rubbish. It's you who is undermining democracy. It's actually that classic thing that you often get when you've got a kind of divided government between the executive and the legislature, where they're kind of tearing strips off each

other. And there's a definite sense of rising tension. And actually, within Allende's regime, there is talk of trying to resolve this by having a massive referendum. And there are some people who say, actually, he was planning to give a speech on the 11th of September saying, look, this has gone on too long. Let's have a huge referendum. Are you with me or are you with the Christian Democrats in Congress? Which side are you on? I don't know how true that is. Of course, we'll never know. What we do know is that a week before the 11th of September,

there are massive demonstrations in Santiago by his supporters to say, we're with you, you won't be toppled, all of this stuff. They're chanting, Allende, Allende, el pueblo te defiende. Allende, Allende, the people will defend you. We're standing with you kind of thing. Ariel Dorfman, the playwright in his article about this in the New Review of Books he says, he was working at the time as a kind of cultural hanger on with the Allende regime, cultural advisor. And he says that in the presidential palace, people were saying, the army are possibly planning something, something could happen, but they don't really think it will come to anything because they know that there is this long tradition of non-intervention in politics. They're hopeful that people like Pinochet will stick to that. Actually, Allende's chief of staff,

Fernando Flores, tells Ariel Dorfman, he says, this guy Pinochet, I have him, I have him in this pocket, nicely tied up. He's our man. We can absolutely rely on him. And in a staggering irony, on Sunday, the 9th of September, Pinochet and one of his other officers, they meet Allende and have a discussion of what they would do if there was a coup. And Allende says to Pinochet, can you draw up basically a plan, what you would tell me what you would do? And Pinochet says, I will do, and I'll let you have it today or tomorrow.

And little does Allende know what is coming. Goodness. But you, dear listeners, you do know what is coming. Goodness. But you dear listeners, you do know what's coming. You know that after the break, we will be embarking on Dominic's brilliant account of the coup that overthrows Allende and brings General Pinochet to power. So we'll see you in a few minutes.

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head to therestisentertainment.com that's therestisentertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com hello welcome back to the rest is history now um just before the break i revealed what is going to happen in this passage i said that the end is going to be toppled pinochet is going to come to power and they told me off for having given away the climax of this narrative. But I think we've already given it away. And the thing is, Dominic, everyone knows this, don't they? Yes.

I mean, this is, even if you haven't, I really know very little about the details, but it is in a way the kind of the archetype of a Latin American tragedy. It is. It absolutely is. I'm intrigued to find out whether it deserves that reputation and what it's done to get that reputation. Well, two things that people get wrong about it, though. First of all, they think of it as General Pinochet's coup. He did not plan it. There would be meetings from the beginning of September onwards among the Chilean, probably late August even, among the Chilean military, the Navy in particular, I think, and the Air Force and so on.

There are groups of them. Pinochet is only invited to these meetings or only becomes a real participant in them at quite a late stage. He goes along with it and nobody at that point thinks of him as the leader. Not at all. The second thing is that everybody thinks is that they think this is a coup planned, masterminded, orchestrated from Washington. Again, that is actually not really right. The CIA do not appear to have planned the coup. They knew it was being planned. They were delighted that it was being planned. And they, of course, lots of listeners will say they have created the climate or they have helped to create the climate. You see, I did not know that. I'd

always assumed that the Americans had sponsored it. Well, they have kind of sponsored it, but it's not their thing. They're not working hand in glove. Not probably as hand in glove as we think, or rather, I think the tendency, certainly in Britain and probably in many of the countries where we have Reston's History listeners, the tendency is to see the Americans as the puppet masters and the Chileans as the marionettes. Don't you think, Tom? I mean, then we do this with all, so much of the Cold War. And actually the marionettes have a life of their own, an agency of their own. And even if the Americans had never existed, I mean, it's hard to imagine this scenario in which the Americans don't exist, but

there would have been people in Chile who would have wanted a coup and would probably have tried. Right. And so the key thing you say is that the role of Pinochet in this becomes all the more intriguing that the Americans have dismissed him as a non-entity and he is not involved in the drawing up of the coup. So Dominic, tell us, what happens? How does he end up becoming the figurehead? Well, there are different versions. Some people say that a couple of days beforehand, people say to him, we're going to do the coup and you have to get involved withhead. Well, there were different versions. Some people say that a couple of days beforehand, people say to him, we're going to do the coup and you have to get involved with it.

Otherwise, we'll have to get rid of you as well. So it's like Vitellius on the Northern Frontier in AD 69. That is exactly right. Being told by his troops, you've got to become emperor of a will. Basically, you're doomed. That is the parallel, of course, that had occurred to me, Tom.

The coup begins. It was postponed by a day. It was originally meant to be on the 10th of September. It actually begins on the 11th. At dawn, the Navy capture the port of Valparaiso, a place where Allende had been as a young man, where he'd helped found the Socialist Party and so on. Immediately, the prefect of the province tells Allende what has happened. Allende goes to the presidential palace, La Moneda, in the center of Santiago with his

bodyguards and with his key ministers. And they're trying to communicate with military leaders. And actually, it's very important to them that they communicate with Pinochet because he's the commander of the army. They can't get through. The telephones are cut off. Communications are down. There's news coming in from Chile that different places are being seized by military units,

all looking very bad. And Allende, at that point, he really wants to get in touch with Pinochet. And he actually says to his aides, I wonder what they've done with poor old Pinochet. Oh no, that's awful. It doesn't occur to him that Pinochet would have joined the plotters. Very quickly, it is obvious that the coup leaders are going to win. So by about 8.30 in the morning, they declare that they have Chile under control and they are officially deposing Allende because there's a national emergency and all this kind of thing.

And by about 9 o'clock, so two hours after the news has come in from Valparaiso, they are in total control with the exception of a small part of the capital with the presidential palace at its core, where Allende is holed up with his loyalists. Now, the army say, if you do not resign, if you do not surrender, we will attack the presidential palace. We will bomb it. We will hammer it with everything we have. We're not messing around here. Some people in Allende's entourage say to him, escape, get out, run, flee. Maybe, who knows, flee to Cuba, do something.

Allende says, no, I'm the democratically elected president. I will stand by the constitution. I am not fleeing anywhere. The military themselves contact the presidential palace and they say, we will fly you and your family out of the country. Now, again, Allende says, no way. But here is the first sign of Pinochet, the real Pinochet, the ruthlessness. Because we now know from amateur recordings that people intercepted the military's own communications and recorded them. There's audio tape of Pinochet talking to

his troops and he's laughing. And he says to them, he says to his aides, that plane will never land, meaning Allende's plane if he accepts the offer. And he also says, if you kill the bitch, you eliminate the litter. So the ruthlessness, the very man he was having a meeting with two days earlier, Tom, he's already talking about killing him, about breaking the deal and killing him. Anyway, Iando doesn't take the deal. He reveals at this point something that nobody had previously suspected, which is this extraordinary cold-blooded ruthlessness. He says, if we're going to do this coup, do it properly, kill our enemies. They're calling for helicopter gunships. They're calling

for aircraft to strike the presidential palace. It takes a while to bring them up to our end. It's got a few more hours. And it's during those few hours that he gives this extraordinary radio speech. So that's the speech with which I began the first episode. Yes. Actually, very Yes. Actually very moving. Incredibly moving. And the thing is that, again, I didn't actually know what happened to him in the coup, but this, again, drawing on the classical parallels, this is very Roman behavior. This is kind of Cato defying an over-ambitious general, destroying the constitution, risking martyrdom. It is exactly. he says to the he

says you know to the people must defend themselves but they must not sacrifice themselves and then he says that bit that you read that you began with other i have faith in chilean's destiny other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail go forward knowing that sooner rather than later the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society. I mean, you can see why a generation of kind of lefty people in Britain found this so moving that there's a little bit of resentment and recrimination there, but not much. And actually, it's this dream of, it's like something from Les Miserables or something. Well, it's Latin this is this is roman behavior at its very best yeah it's noblest no actually even in the audio that speech is it's terrible crackly audio but

you can hear hints of the kind of gunfire in the background and things as we approach sort of two o'clock in the afternoon fighter jets are striking at the presidential palace there's tear gas everywhere the smoke everywhere so what happens to all Allende? So he and some of his aides are trying to get out. So he is trying to get out, is he? Well, wait for it. He says to them, let's all try to get out and surrender. There's about 30 people. They start to go out. There's a guy called Dr. Patricio Aguijon, I think it is. And he's one of Allende's doctors. And he tells the story that the fires in the palace, they start to go out. Allende says, I'll take up the rear. And then as they start to go out, Allende slips away.

And this guy, the doctor, goes back to see what's happened to Allende. And he sees him in Independence Hall in the palace with the AK-47 that fidel castro had given him and he puts it in his mouth uh i think it is and basically blows his own head off the two bullets now that's not the story that was told that was often told after and his death because fidel castro just a couple of weeks after this, told a big crowd in Havana that Allende had died in battle, fight firing at Pinochet's troops. And of course, there are lots of people- He sees that as a more heroic- More heroic death.

There are lots of people who wanted to believe that. And so it became a very popular idea though. I think the whole, the echoes of cato killing himself rather than submit to caesar i think that it's just as heroic if not more i mean it it absolutely casts him as a martyr and that's the role that that he then plays isn't that brutus and cassius yes they kill themselves as well that idea of suicide rather than submit to an autocrat i mean it is a very ancient tradition yeah and i think it's generally agreed that's what happened. There was an autopsy by Spanish pathologists or whatever they are, forensic scientists in 2011. You can Google it. And they said, yes, this is pretty much no doubt

that Allende took his own life. So we should just talk about how the coup is wrapped up. By the afternoon of September the 11th, it's pretty much all done and dusted. Allende's ministers are generally either killed immediately or they're flown to concentration camps, particularly a concentration camp in Chilean Patagonia or an island. I think what surprises people in America is that the Chilean military is so bloodthirsty. I don't think they saw that coming because there's no hint of it. So that's including the CIA? I mean, maybe they did, but I don't think... The CIA prepare a paper for Henry Kissinger at the end of October where they basically say, we haven't actually been able to add up,

get a correct tally of the casualties because there have been so many. We think that the military have probably killed about 1,500 people. And would that include the ministers? What happens to the ministers in the concentration camp? So some of them are killed, some of them aren't. Some of them are tortured and then let out. They've probably rounded up at first about 13,000 to 14,000 people. Now, very famously, a lot of those people are housed in the Chilean National Stadium. I mean, this is a detail that lots of people will remember from this story, the football stadium. At one point, there were 7,000 people in there. They used the field itself, the football field, to hold the men. The women are held in the many of them are, they're thrown into the river or their bodies are dumped in the ocean or they're just dumped at night in the streets. And there were some very, very well-known examples of people who were killed. So the best known Chilean one,

at least outside Chile, is a guy called Victor Jara, who was a poet and a sort of folk singer and stuff. He had written Allende's election song in 1970. He had performed at a ceremony to honor Pablo Neruda when Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Victor Jaro is seen as the kind of great balladeer of the Chilean left, and he is killed in a smaller stadium, the Estadio Chile, five days after the coup. For our American listeners, they will undoubtedly know this

story. A lot of them, it's immortalized in the film Missing with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. There was a guy called Charlie Horman. He was a Harvard graduate who had gone to Santiago to try and become a writer and a filmmaker. He'd been really into the Chilean regime. By hideous mischance, he was in the seaside town of Viña del Mar when the coup broke out. And he's got into conversation in a bar or something like that, or in a hotel with some Americans. And the Americans said, oh, we work for the US Navy. We're just down here doing a job. And it's done. We're going to go home now. And he's like, oh, what's the job? And the mood turns very icy. He goes back to Santiago. He is eventually rounded

up. He is taken away. He is taken to the national stadium and he is tortured and killed. So I'm surprised about that because I would have thought that... I mean, doesn't that risk relations between the new Chilean regime and the United States if they're busy torturing and executing American citizens? Well, it's not the only one. There was also a guy called Frank Terugi who was working for a pro-ANDE newspaper. He was tortured with electrodes and killed in the national stadium too. They knew each other, actually. The Americans know almost immediately that Charlie Holman has been killed. Whether it was a mistake, we don't know. Whether actually he knew too much.

I mean, that's the implication of the film missing. Because he'd spoken to these sailors. Because he'd spoken to these Americans. So this conversation plays a huge part in missing. The idea that he's basically stumbled into something and has to be eliminated. The extraordinary thing is that his father, Ed, and his wife, Joyce, launched this great hunt for him. And Ed, played by Jack Lemmon in the film, comes to Santiago, and he goes to the embassy. He talks to people from the embassy and the CIA. They lie to him.

They say, we've heard that he's escaped. He's been smuggled to safety, knowing that he's dead. And then when they finally admit he's dead, he's been murdered, all this, the State Department, and this is an unbelievable detail, they sent Ed Harmon a telegram telling him that he needed to pay $900 to have the body shipped back home to the United States. So a pretty grim story, and not the only grim story. A month after the coup, Pinochet sets in motion something called the caravan of death that's not good is it so one of his um associates a guy called general Ariano Stark he goes off with a load of other officers and they tour the country going to the provinces

and in each province they identify people and they tell them to hand themselves in they're trade unionists poets lefty people all of that sort of tell them to hand themselves in. They're trade unionists, poets, lefty people, all of that sort of stuff. These people hand themselves in often. They're put into cells and they're taken away and then they're tortured, bayoneted and shot. And this anticipates what's going to happen with something called DINA, which is the Directorate of National Intelligence, which becomes this kind of great institution for kind of arresting people, torturing them, disappearing them, all of this kind of thing. So that's one element of the post-coup regime. The other element that nobody could possibly have anticipated before the 11th of September

1973 was that Pinochet himself would prove as ambitious and ruthless as he did. So the junta, the military regime, is meant to be a rotating regime. The army will have a go, the air force will have a go, the navy will have a go. And Pinochet goes first because he's the oldest, the army is the most senior. He'll do it for six months or whatever, then hand it over. And he doesn't. He basically uses his power straight away to browbeat the other services into accepting him as the supreme chief of the nation. That's what he calls himself. And he sets up a personality cult. So people start to say, Pinochet has been chosen by God. He has the special approval of the Virgin Mary to destroy

communism. And the coup was necessary. He is the savior of the nation. Mrs. Thatcher explicitly picks up on this in that speech at the beginning that you quoted, Tom. He saved us from communism and he is the great Chilean national hero. And so by 1974, he has supreme power in a way that nobody had possibly predicted. Does he have sunglasses, a bigger uniform, bigger hat? There's a very famous photograph of him sitting. you know, not long after he's been named as Supreme Chief. He's sitting there with all his officers and he is wearing the classic dark glasses. And he mentioned his hat. As the top man, Captain General, that's the title that has not been used in Chile since the days of Bernardo O'Higgins, the great liberation hero. As Captain General, he has a hat that is slightly bigger than everybody else's hat. So what the Americans didn't pick up on in those intelligence reports was the vanity that would reveal itself once he became supreme leader. And of course, his regime, Tom,

I mean, it's not just controversial because of the coup. It's controversial because under his leadership, probably 3,000 to 4,000 people were killed and about maybe 30,000, 20,000 to 30,000 tortured. So that understood. I mean, he really does sound as bad as the myth makes him. And yet, Mrs. Thatcher, she's Baroness Thatcher, standing up in the House of Lords, saying he's tremendous. I mean, I don't want to say there's another side to a guy who's toppled a democratically elected government and murdered and tortured left, right, and centre and given himself a bigger hat. But for Mrs. Thatcher, there are two things he does, right? So he supports Britain in the Falklands, and So she feels grateful gratitude for that. But he is also a kind of, she sees him as a kind of fellow Thatcherite, someone who institutes an economic revolution that she sees him as a kind of fellow traveler like that.

A little bit, yeah. So to what extent is there any justification for the case that she was making for him, do you think? Oh, that's a very difficult, I mean, that's ultimately a political decision that you, the listener, make. Whether you think that... There'll be some listeners, probably not a majority, but there'll be some listeners who say, listen, Allende was making a terrible mess of things. This was a Cold War. Chile was sliding towards Cuban-style socialism. If we had Chilean listeners, Tom, I don't really think we'd do.

But if we did, there would certainly be some of them who would say that. And they would say, Pinochet saved the country from this slide into the abyss of Marxism. Despite the violence with which he did it, the brutality with which he did it, despite the rupturing of the Constitution. They would say, listen, the Constitution, neither here nor there, this was an emergency. And they would say of the violence, that was better than the violence that would have come if a revolutionary Marxist regime had seized power. And that's what they would want to, presumably, well, I'm guessing, I mean, that's not necessarily what I think. I'm kind of guessing what they would say.

I think for Mrs. Thatcher, for Ronald Reagan, for all the myriad actually Western governments that supported Pinochet or smiled upon his regime, they were operating in a Cold War context where actually they quite often supported authoritarian regimes. I mean, the Chilean regime is not unique in South America. Argentina, Brazil, or Uruguay, they all have very close links with the Americans. But what I hadn't appreciated was the depth of the democratic traditions within Chile. I suppose there's a slight measure, again, going back to the Roman echoes of Sulla choosing to lay down his power. With Pinochet?

With Pinochet. No, I think that's...... Mrs. Thatcher is wrong about this, I think, when she gives that... So she's got that wrong? There was a referendum, absolutely right, at the end of the 1980s on whether he should continue, and he lost. He didn't really want to call the referendum. He was pressured into calling the referendum by younger officers, by people in politics. Okay. Because it does seem a bit, I was thinking it does seem a bit out of character, this bloodless yet ruthless brute. And he insists on retaining kind of titles and a kind of, you know, it's like a kind of professor emeritus.

Yeah. The big hat and all that sort of stuff. Absolutely. So the idea that he said this kind of ultimately kindly man lays down his power and retires to grow cabbages is not quite correct. I mean, that's not the case at all. So, I mean, I do think it's probably too, you don't understand what happened with the coup unless you understand the Cold War context, the immense fear on both sides of something worse. And there will be people in Chile right to this day. There are

lots of people in Chile to this day who say, oh, Pinochet saved us from Marxism. Well, so this guy who's ahead in the polls that we've got in this episode talking about. Yeah, cast. Exactly. There are lots of people who would... So I think it's perhaps too... It's a little bit like that thing about thinking about the Americans as the omnipotent puppet masters. It's easy to think, oh, everybody in Chile was actually a folk music aficionado who loved nothing more than free milk. But actually, there are loads of people who are horrified by Allendean.

Of course. I mean, that's the fascination of history and how it can shade into politics. I think, yes, exactly. That you're, to me, not to a lot of historians on Twitter, I think it's fair to say, but to me, one of the central aspects of being a scholar of history is trying to put aside your own political prejudices rather than just blindly indulging them. On Pinochet, I think I'll tell you one thing that occurred to me, Tom, while I was preparing this podcast, which is you talked in the first episode about Costa Rica, comparing Costa Rica.

Individuals do have choices. So in Costa Rica, we talked about the Civil War of the 1940s and this guy, Don Pepe, who won power and he abolished the military. And then he actually turned out to be a tremendous fellow. He was about two feet tall, wasn't he? And he was foiling hijacks and just doing all kinds of good things. Pinochet didn't have to electrocute all those people. He'd taken power. He didn't have to keep killing them. He didn't have to have the caravan of death. He didn't have to do all those things.

He had a choice. And actually, you can have military coups and authoritarian regimes, some that are better than others. The regime of General Pinochet himself was very corrupt. He amassed an enormous fortune and his family, billions and billions of dollars. The continuation of the machinery of repression, I would argue, was totally unnecessary. And so I think an attempt to sort of rehabilitate him and to say, I think that it found us on those facts. I suppose, I mean, there's an element of Macbeth, isn't there? I am in blood, stepped in so far that should I wait no more, returning were as tedious as goer, that once you start removing your predecessor and murdering

people, the murdering just has to carry on because otherwise you're worried that you're going to be toppled. I think there's a huge element to that. I think the extraordinary thing is that he'd lived so long, to late middle age, and he hadn't killed anybody or electrocuted anybody. And then when he has the chance, he turns out to be so savage. I think that's the remarkable thing. You know, he's not Stalin. He hasn't been a gangster as a boy or hadn't been involved in revolutionary organizations. He's just been a boring, institutionalized kind of officer.

And then he has this chance and he seizes it. But maybe that makes him more chilling. I mean, more kind of frightening. The idea that a dull functionary can suddenly start throwing people out of airplanes and things. Of course. He reminds me a bit of General Franco, another very boring man who turns out to be just very bloodthirsty. And again, a man about whom people have very, very strong and polarized opinions. Because there would be some people who say,

oh, Dominic beating up on General Franco, shocking wokery, General Franco actually saved Spain. I don't think there are that many, though, now, who would... General Franco. Maybe people at The Spectator? Because Franco is seen as a fascist, and to be seen as a fascist puts you beyond the pale. But Pinochet, perhaps, is seen as a, I don't know, a free marketeer. I'm not saying that it's true. I have no way of knowing. Pinochet is much closer to Franco than he is to Margaret Thatcher, I would say. I mean, there's a point actually in the early 1980s, Tom, just on the Margaret Thatcher thing. I mean, it's unusual that we do a podcast where I haven't spoken up for Mrs. Thatcher in some way, because I do think sometimes she gets a bit of an unfair press. But

just on this, there's a point where she has a meeting, actually, not with a Chilean minister, but with an Argentine minister. And they say, oh, our economic experiment works really well. And when people complain about unemployment and stuff, we just electrocute them and it's fine. And she says, I don't approve of these methods at all. And she actually writes to Friedrich Hayek, the economist who's one of the founding fathers of this revolution, says, these are not methods that we would want to copy in Britain. So there you go. Okay. Well, on that pro-Thatcherite note, I think we should say hasta luego. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for a brilliant account of this seismic episode in Latin American history. In fact, it's a seismic, globally,

it's a seismic event. It still continues to reverberate to this day. So thank you very much for listening. Adios. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

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